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Christopher Borrelli

Friends, music fans, people who stand in line for $5 coffee drinks: We are gathered here today to bid farewell to another idea from Starbucks. It felt like only yesterday we were saying goodbye to the coffeehouse chain's "Race Together" initiative, created to spur honest, thoughtful conversations on race with Starbucks baristas. And now, as of Tuesday, Starbucks has quietly pulled CDs from its 21,000 stores.

Each Jesus Christ was weighty and sizable, about 21/2 feet long, cross included. Each statue had come out of a mold, then plaster had dripped off, pooled and hardened, settling around the edges and leaving thin crescents of residue that clung to the crucifixes like mushrooms. None had been painted yet; each was still white and identical. Faheem Majeed set three of these raw statues side by side on top of a wooden school desk, to create his foundation. Then he reached into a cardboard box, pushed aside packing blankets and lifted out a fourth statue of Christ on the cross. He placed it perpendicularly across the others.

Just off Irving Park Road in North Center, on one of those lonesome industrial strips where the bricks and mortar blend effortlessly with the overcast Chicago afternoon, there is a building you cannot enter, you are not invited to visit and you would probably not go to anyway. Literally and metaphorically. It is a petri dish of tasteful avant-garde, a former photo album factory downsized and divvied into so many artisan studios that it has become a microcosm of 21st-century Chicago hipsterdom. In one corner, you find the independent CHIRP Radio; down the hall, a few concert and event poster-makers; on a different floor, the adventurous Third Coast Percussion, and the Grammy-winning chamber music ensemble eighth blackbird.

If I were the president of the world, Taschen, the fittingly German publisher of monolithic art books that manage to be simultaneously intimidating, terrifically obsessive, gorgeously produced and breathtakingly gaudy, would have the rights to publish everyone's high school yearbooks. Granted, your yearbook would cost $400 and come on paper stock so sturdy you could slice apples with the pages, the fashion section would include tasteful-tacky nudes from Helmut Newton, and the whole shebang would weigh 25 pounds.

A couple of weeks ago, a blood vessel burst in Gary Huck's left eye. It was the same day that Bruce Rauner, Illinois' new Republican governor, unveiled his state budget, calling for $6 billion in cuts to such sacred cows as the University of Illinois and Medicaid, and steep pension reductions for government workers. The proposal was criticized immediately by labor leaders as the latest salvo from Rauner against public employee unions. Huck sat at his desk in Rogers Park and read and took this all in and, at some point that afternoon, his left eye turned crimson. He said he doesn't think it was a psychosomatic reaction to the proposed budget; he doubts that Bruce Rauner set out to intentionally cause anything in his head to pop.

Eldzier Cortor, whose sculptural, Afro-Deco images of elegant, elongated black women were once so quietly enmeshed with the 20th century as to seem almost invisible, returned to Chicago the other day. He hadn't been back in decades — many, many decades. He had grown up here, on the West and South Sides; his family, which moved from Virginia in 1917, were a part of the Great Migration. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, painted everyday Bronzeville for the Work Progress Administration and became a colleague to Chicago Black Renaissance stars Richard Wright, Archibald Motley and Gwendolyn Brooks; but then, in the 1950s, after also co-founding the South Side Community Art Center, he moved to New York.

Once there was a time when watching the Academy Awards was like going to a zoo that only stayed open for a few hours every year. You climbed aboard your tram (or couch), grabbed your binoculars (or popcorn), the gates of the park would swing wide and for a night, you were granted an opportunity to observe a very distinct species of human being, a rare genus that had somehow recognized a trait in itself and migrated to Los Angeles to live among the palm trees, inside vast gated enclosures inaccessible to ordinary people.

G. William Harder, self-described Satanist, self-proclaimed good friend to bad people, collector of serial-killer letters and prison art, proprietor of the website murderauction.com and seller of "Got Satan?" T-shirts, stroked habitually at his chin. He gathered together the strands of dry brush that he calls a goatee and tugged them into a spike. He wore a white shirt, long baggy black shorts, a skinny black tie and a pentagram pin on his collar. A middle-aged man was telling him that he knew someone who knew someone who searched Jeffrey Dahmer's house in Milwaukee — one of the police officers who raided the killer's home in 1991 — and found a severed head in the refrigerator. Harder listened closely but did not look especially impressed.

The first time I visited Chicago, about 25 years ago, I asked the clerk at the front desk of my hotel if he would point me in the direction of the John Belushi statue, the John Belushi memorial, the John Belushi honorary whatever. Because I had always assumed there was one. Alongside "Star Wars," K-tel records and Steve Martin, this Albanian-American from Wheaton played such an outsized role in so many '70s childhoods, there had to be something. Those dancing eyebrows, that coiled Tasmanian Devil caricature of a presence, that cheerfully rampaging personality behind a sweet smile — Belushi was the unshackled id of the Carter administration, the rebel you wanted to be before you knew any better. My friend Todd Sharon and I danced as Blues Brothers at our high school talent show. And to this day, along with my first phone number, I can recite Belushi's very first line on the first episode of "Saturday Night Live" from 40 years ago:

Laurie Glenn, a Chicago public policy activist and founder of the politically minded arts group ThinkArt, dropped her leather bag into a chair. We met in a conference room of the Woods Fund of Chicago, a grant-making foundation on Wacker Drive with an eye on social justice issues. Glenn, who also runs the social justice-minded consulting firm Thinkinc., was there for a strategy meeting, "to talk influence-building." I was there to steal her for a second, to look at the artwork she would be installing in River North's Josef Glimer Gallery.

Depending how you see it, and how generous you are, the wonders of "Jupiter Ascending," the new space opera from Chicago filmmakers Lana and Andy Wachowski, the team behind "The Matrix," should be endless. For those who come to regard it as a camp classic (and this contingent will be legion), there are space soldiers in what appear to be Mexican wrestling masks; Channing Tatum looking like Puck in a high school production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; Eddie Redmayne's nutty hoarse whisperer of a villain.

A few years ago, on a TV show that you likely never watch and probably never heard of but eventually might appreciate, Bob Odenkirk crafted a brief and remarkable performance. In fact, until Odenkirk joined AMC's acclaimed "Breaking Bad" in 2009 as the smarmy underworld lawyer Saul Goodman, became a series favorite and then the leading man of its hotly anticipated spinoff "Better Call Saul," he might have written his epitaph with such praise: Here lies Bob Odenkirk. He was influential, funny, underrated and fleeting.

Someday, when the dust settles on the turbulent, game-changing history of early 21st-century media — at that far-off point when the use of jargon like "game-changing" is met swiftly, and by decree, with a light prison sentence — let's hope this small, tossed-off moment is not forgotten: On Jan. 11, 2015, during their opening monologue at the normally boozy and irrelevant Golden Globe Awards, hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler pretended they didn't have enough time to recognize the TV people in attendance and led the audience in a call-and-response: "When we say, 'Movies,' you say, 'Awesome!' …"

Deep in the midst of Christmas shopping last month, I came across a clever, kitschy picture frame. Part of its design, at the edge of the picture glass, was metal cutouts of people bowing effusively, we're-not-worthy style, to whatever image you put inside the frame. The image the shop's owner placed inside the floor sample? A picture of Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. I asked why and the owner said, seriously, "They're my spirit animals." Her answer sat with me, and later that afternoon, I called up Etsy on my phone and typed "Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer" into the search line, waited a moment, then, voila:

Jeremy Wechsler is not the kind of guy you ask if he has watched the trailer for the new "Star Wars" movie yet. He's the kind of guy you ask how many times he has watched the trailer for the new "Star Wars" movie. Which, he notes, opens 12 months from now. Wechsler is 45 and potbellied, a middle-aged fanboy. Just after his first daughter was born, before even leaving the hospital, he held her and cooed that soon he would be introducing her to the heroes of "Star Wars," reading to her from the Harry Potter books …

Of course the literary Chicagoan of 2014 could have been a happy author, any one of the many local writers who had a very good 2014. Some of the year's most elegant nonfiction came from Eula Biss' slender breakthrough "On Immunity," and some of its best fiction came from novelist Cristina Henriquez and her "Book of Unknown Americans." Jeffrey Brown's popular "Star Wars" books for kids brought the once-obscure cartoonist closer to pop ubiquity. Esteemed short-storyist Stuart Dybek released two acclaimed works on the same day. Legendary historian Garry Wills turned 80 without snapping his book-a-year streak. Meanwhile, both Gillian Flynn and Veronica Roth had successful Hollywood adaptations and took home all of the cash.

Bummed you never had the guts to slap on your best Batman armor last spring and enter the C2E2 Crown Championships of Cosplay at McCormick Place? Intimidated by the depth of detail and craftsmanship that went into some of those costumes (remember the Transformers suit — that didn't even win)? You have a chance at redemption.

Marc Fischer approached the Logan Square post office the way a beaten dog approaches its owner. He came at it sideways, tentatively, prepared to flee. His memories of the place were not especially warm.

At the far northwest edge of Chicago, the intersection of Devon and Caldwell avenues serves as a busy junction, an unheralded gateway to the suburbs and beyond. Travel is never far from your mind in this spot. The No. 85A CTA bus winds an endless loop around Edgebrook, its modest neighborhood. To the west, the North Branch of the Chicago River; to the east, the Edens Expressway; and the Kennedy is a quick jog south. Metra trains cut a path here, slowing the steady flux of cars that use Devon as a back way into O'Hare International Airport, which sprawls to the west and creates its own freeways high above.

To find the latest performance piece by the rising experimental dance company Khecari — "rhymes with 'treachery,'" explains founder Jonathan Meyer — go to West Rogers Park on the Far North Side. Specifically, Indian Boundary Park on Lunt Avenue, an oasis of green hemmed in by duplexes, apartment buildings and family homes. Once there, you will move instinctively toward the 1929 Tudor Revival fieldhouse on the south end of the park; it seems to be the only conceivable place for a dance performance here. But continue past, to the north end: On a brisk autumn evening, the only sound should be the rustling of trees, the only smell the damp foliage. If you can feel the drama, congratulations: You're getting closer to Khecari.

Until recently, I was a voting member of the James Beard Foundation, which gives out a number of highly valued annual awards to chefs and restaurants. But I was not a very active member, and certainly, while eating out, that membership never came up. Restaurants never seemed particularly aware: I can't recall a time being treated egregiously well. Alinea never left extra garlic bread. The other day, however, now shorn of influence, I had a power fantasy while eating at a suburban restaurant with clear pretense toward a Beard award or Michelin star. It was brunch. My dish came with an over-easy egg. But since it was brunch, at the risk of upsetting the integrity of the dish, I asked for my egg scrambled.

As Thomas Wolfe once wrote (and I believe I'm accurate here): You can go home again despite the fact your new sitcom on Fox just pulled a 0.7/2 rating among viewers 18 to 49, attracting 1 million fewer eyeballs than your lead-in, a "Family Guy" repeat. Of course, Thomas Wolfe also (and actually) wrote the classic "You Can't Go Home Again," which offers this uplifting advice: "Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don't freeze up." So I guess the lesson here is, Thomas Wolfe sent mixed signals.

The first thing to know about "Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich: Homage to Photographic Masters," the new exhibition opening at the Catherine Edelman Gallery in River North on Saturday, is that the artists mean it.

Billy DuBose, of Elmhurst, does not make a particularly gargantuan impression. He is 31, of medium height and modest build. His hair is thinning into Louis C.K. tufts. He has an unassuming air, works as a marketing assistant at National Lift Truck, his father's forklift business in Franklin Park. Sometimes, he says, he is asked to shovel snow. But Billy DuBose knows something about commitment. You probably think you understand commitment. But have you ever, like DuBose, spent six years shooting an amateur Godzilla film in your garage? Have you showed up, for six years in a row, at a Godzilla fan convention in Rosemont, camera in hand, imploring C-list actors from official Godzilla films to appear in your no-budget Godzilla film?

Martin Amis walked slowly onto the auditorium stage of the Francis W. Parker School in Lincoln Park and stared grimly into the audience. He looked the part of the austere British novelist: gray suit, blue dress shirt, no tie, white hair swept back in thin humps, a rictus of dyspepsia. Donna Seaman — the Charlie Rose of Chicago author talks, the most reliably thoughtful interviewer at these sort of events — introduced her subject, explaining "the Times of London named (Amis) one of the 50 most important British authors since 1945." She said this the way a docent might wave her hand before a rare and esteemed piece of stonework.

Near the end of Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar," as this vast science fiction blockbuster-to-be neared its third hour, the floodgates burst: My chin quivered (check), tear ducts filled (check), cheeks grew warmer (check). And yup, I cried. Sneaking a peek behind myself, film publicists cried too; turning farther, I spotted security guards (hired by Paramount Pictures to ensure I didn't bootleg the film) taking clandestine swipes at their own faces. I did not quite understand what had just happened on that (very large Imax) screen, but Nolan, once again, had accomplished something many of his studio contemporaries have not been able to muster:

At the risk of sounding like I'm "mansplaining": Female nonfiction writers are having a moment. How do I know this? The literary ether has whispered it for months: Lena Dunham ("Girls") recently Instagrammed a picture of Megan Stielstra's book of essays, "Once I Was Cool." Stielstra, a writing teacher at Columbia College Chicago, saw an uptick in interest for her book, which came out in May. Coincidentally, Dunham's own book of essays, "Not That Kind of Girl," is No. 2 on The New York Times' nonfiction best-seller list; she appeared earlier this month at the Chicago Humanities Festival. Stielstra is appearing at the festival Wednesday, interviewing the memoirist/essayist Cheryl Strayed ("Wild"). And Strayed was recently asked by the Times' book section:

It's possible your idea of a restaurant is less broad than mine, but my favorite restaurant in this city at the moment — my favorite for the last few years — sits in an empty Brooklyn lot against the East River. That's on Saturday afternoons through Nov. 22. On Sunday afternoons through Nov. 23, Smorgasburg occupies an empty lot a stone's throw from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Order some food, grab a spot at a picnic table and look out on lower Manhattan. Autumn, when hipster knee socks give way to hipster windbreakers, and summer fairs seem a long ways off, is the best time to visit.

Michael Kutza sliced through the crush with a smile. It's what he has done for decades. Well-wishers, sponsors, staffers, friends, filmmakers, moviegoers, people who say Chicago would be a culturally poorer place without him and people who say he's an incorrigible, tone-deaf socialite who does the city few favors: Everyone stepped aside, and Kutza strode through the lobby, down a hallway and into a theater at AMC River East 21, the unassuming, proletarian showcase for the Chicago International Film Festival, which Kutza founded. His smile is his weapon, the first thing you notice about him. It's mischievous and reddens his face, his grin expanding across his cheeks with Hollywood wattage.

One day this past summer when I knew I would have a little free time, I thought I would meet up with Cameron Esposito, who seems to have very little free time anymore. A few years ago she had been a fixture on the Chicago comedy scene but decided the Midwest wasn't stable ground for a female comic with ambition: "I didn't want to be 48, still renting an apartment and having to go out and perform every night, just to barely live."

John Mulaney has the benevolent wide-set eyes, cresting hair and copacetic choirboy appearance of a superhero who has taken a spa day. He is trim to the point of receding, and as angular as Peter Parker. He walks with his hands plunged deep in his pockets, and when he listens, he is assessing and shrewd, suggesting a confidence and insight beyond his 32 years. But here's the thing about Mulaney: He's also worthless, redundant and antiquated, a portrait of high self-image commingling with low self-worth.

Forty seasons into "Saturday Night Live" and you just don't hear the old criticisms so much anymore: "It's not as edgy as it was in the 1970s …" "This new cast is not as funny as that previous cast …" "It's such a boy's club …"

Walking across Western Avenue on a muggy September afternoon, Gillian Flynn stepped through the rutted pavement of a construction zone and explained with patience and precision how she would murder me one day. Granted, I had asked. Say you needed to kill me, I proposed, how would you do it? Hammer? Rope? A chain saw to the back? Immediately, I regretted asking, and not because she had an unnervingly ready response. The question was gauche: In polite conversation, one does not ask a magician to perform a magic trick or a comedian to tell a joke, and one does not ask the hottest crime and mystery writer in the nation, particularly one with a knack for bottomless wells of unease and characters harboring corrosive tempers, to plot your death. It's tacky. Thankfully, Flynn is not a polite conversationalist, and she doesn't blink at tacky.

There was a time, a fleeting moment last year, when the staff at the Museum of Contemporary Art figured it could be subtle about "David Bowie Is," opening Tuesday. They thought the show itself was so literally flashy and large that they didn't need to schedule a bunch of ancillary concerts and celebrations and lectures and dance performances.

Sometime soon, should you find yourself backstage at the Museum of Contemporary Art, wandering its administrative offices, be sure to look for the pencil drawing of David Bowie as a banana. It is not an official curated piece of museum art; rather, it is an unsigned doodle taped to a hallway wall alongside a few dozen other works of office-space ephemera, all riffing on the only thing that anyone at the MCA is allowed to think about these days: David Bowie. There are concert photos of Bowie and fashion layouts of Bowie, a picture of President Barack Obama with a Ziggy Stardust-era lightning bolt across his face and a folksy cross-stich that reads: "David Bowie told me to do it in a dream." It is the staff's Great Wall of Bowie, inscribed across the top with:

With all respect to Stefon, the gushy club-hopping, seen-it-all, lives-in-a-trash-can-near-Radio-Shack correspondent that Bill Hader played on "Saturday Night Live," the Bill Hader story has everything: A childhood in Oklahoma, a job in a movie theater, community college, years of doubt in Los Angeles, a production-assistant gig on "The Scorpion King," assistant editing jobs on reality TV shows, a stint as Arnold Schwarzenegger's personal go-fer, Second City (Los Angeles), eight years as a cast member on "Saturday Night Live," regular voice-over work on a successful animated franchise ("Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs"), memorable supporting roles in a number of smart comedies ("Superbad," "Adventureland"), that thing where you occasionally write for "South Park" but don't actually work for "South Park," a wife, kids...

Just beyond the south gates of the Brookfield Zoo, in a backstage area where visitors are not allowed, there is a squat, sand-colored building. It resembles an artist's studio trapped inside a mechanic's garage. One wall opens up and remains open throughout the warmest months. Inside are dozens of paint-splattered buckets and small forests of paint brushes and a cement mixer; there are jugs of liquid plastic and shelves of thick starboard and miles of PVC pipe. There are also worktables and, on top of each, molds of trees and rocks.

Back in the fall I suggested that Vince Vaughn remake himself in the model of Matthew McConaughey. They're both tall and charmingly smooth. Their careers took off in the 1990s as they excelled at playing rakish, borderline repulsive figures. And they both went through a long dark age, making a lot of bad movies in the years since. They have a lot in common.

On Friday afternoon, while a steady rain fell on Lollapalooza in Grant Park, Patrick Whelan watched warily as a handful of teenagers and 20-somethings ran for shelter beneath the nearby trees. There, waiting for the storm to pass, they drank beer and lit joints. Whelan sat in a folding chair a few feet away, the pungent smell of pot wafting toward his space, a small tented lounge he had named Sober Side. The name was a nod to the South Side. At the Bonnaroo music festival in Tennessee, his tent was named “SoberRoo”; at the Lightning in a Bottle music festival in California, he had called it “Lightning Without a Bottle.”

At the dawn of civilization — when people would buy concert tickets because they wanted to hear music, when the purchase of that ticket implied some degree of interest in the performers onstage — there was no under-butt.

Time is ticking. Summer will be gone before you know it, and with it many of those moments you thought you would remember all of your life, vanished by Columbus Day, replaced with a reel of different memories that will probably seem trivial. That's how memory and time conspire: Eventually you forget the face of the summer love you met at camp when you were 11, but that fleeting remark from a Little League coach about hard work rattles around your head into old age. And yet, before autumn crashes in, there are a few things you can do to slow down time, or at least luxuriate in its passing.

Lost in the news on Wednesday about the first batch of American nominees for the prestigious Man Booker Prize -- which, for the first time in the 46-year history of the award, has been opened to writers beyond the U.K., the Commonwealth and Ireland -- was that among the five Americans who made it on the longlist of finalists, four are Midwesterners. Albeit, transplanted now elsewhere. (We'll take it where we can get it.)

It would have been nice to get all dramatic and scratchy-voiced right now and say that Wednesday, July 23, 2014, is the 75th anniversary of Batman, and that there can be only one Dark Knight. But that would be a lie. And it wouldn't be honoring the most paranoid, skeptical superhero of all time to play along with that lie. Batman himself was once named "Bat-Man," and throughout 75 years of Bat-soap opera, everyone from his Bat-family to his Bat-enemies have worn the cape and cowl. And about that anniversary date: It's as arbitrarily concocted as Sweetest Day — even DC Comics, which declared July 23 is Batman Day, formally recognizes March 30, 1939, as his debut (i.e., the publishing date of the May 1939 issue of "Detective Comics," in which Batman first fought crime).

Life, it has been said, is crap. Endless, difficult, you're forever in line behind some idiot, and your fate is determined by infinitesimal factors set in place long before you stepped foot in the game. No, wait: I meant golf is crap, endless, difficult, etc. And yet, both hold true, no? That, at least, seems to be the playfully frustrating premise behind the Walker Art Center's Artist-Designed Mini Golf.

Tony Madonia, real estate agent, watched the front doors of the Legacy at Millennium Park. For a guy who sells luxury condos, he did not seem especially relaxed, so we reminded him that he was not being asked to sell a $1.6 million apartment to director Rob Reiner. Just, you know, show him around the place. Madonia asked to be reminded why he was doing this.

Last winter I emailed Chicago filmmaker Joe Swanberg and said I would like to write a profile of him. The reason was obvious: Unusual as it may seem for a dizzyingly prolific 32-year-old iconoclast who has directed more than 15 films in the past decade — and discovered Greta Gerwig, who starred in his 2007 calling card, "Hannah Takes the Stairs," and built a respectable side career as an actor in horror films — to be having a renaissance, Swanberg fit the bill.

The front door stood wide open and Rachel Bertsche could be seen from the street, zooming through the foyer of her Lincoln Park townhouse, a peach Lululemon blur in black tights. I stepped tentatively inside the doorway and reconsidered immediately: Bertsche did not look as calm or as centered as I anticipated. She did not exude the serenity of Julia Roberts, the poise of Jennifer Aniston or confidence of Tina Fey. Clearly, she had not achieved perfection. She was frantic, and tugged in a million directions. She didn’t even seem to notice I was there. I stepped outside to give her a moment. On the sidewalk was Charlie the Roofer, waiting to get paid. Bertsche said she would write him a check and, before I could say hello, she was gone again.

For the past 21/2 months, five nights a week, Amber Schabdach, senior paintings conservator for the Conservation Center, wrapped small sticks in cotton, creating makeshift Q-tips. Then she climbed onto a hydraulic lift and rose 20 feet in the air. There she stood for eight hours every night, roughly 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., working her DIY swabs in tight, repetitive circles until the paintings before her were clear of dirt.

A threatening row of CGI-esque clouds gathered at the edge of Millennium Park. This was last month, at a 30th anniversary screening of "Ghostbusters" in Pritzker Pavilion. Twenty- and 30-somethings sprawled across blankets on the lawn, warily eyeing a quick summer storm as it pushed over the Loop, the clouds not so different from those ominous, non-CGI weather systems that circle Central Park in the movie.

"Transformers: Age of Extinction," the fourth installment of Michael Bay's $2.6-billion blue-chip franchise about a race of super robot freedom fighters that wear codpieces (to hide the junk under their trunk) and appear fundamentally incapable of not banging into stuff (even when these things are in an open field they find the one barn or tractor for miles around to collide with), is an aggressively charmless act of digital confetti. It is scattered, weightless, impossible to get hold of, and somehow, after seven years and more than 10 hours of screen time, I could not tell you what these films are about. Explosions? Real estate? Let's say: "Transformers: Age of Extinction" is 165 minutes, 11 minutes longer than the next longest installment ("Transformers: Dark of the Moon"), 10 minutes shorter than that piece of trash "The Godfather."

Jaume Plensa visited his giant heads the other day. He arrived at a corner of Madison Street and Michigan Avenue, found a park bench and reflected. His giant heads appeared to be doing fine, he said. The older heads hadn't aged very much, and the newer heads, despite a long trip in shipping containers from Spain, looked serene and comfortable in Chicago. The two older heads — or rather, the two older faces: 50 feet tall and 23 feet wide, gargoyle-esque and spitting water — stood where he left them a decade ago. Plensa is the Barcelona artist who created Crown Fountain in Millennium Park. For a few moments he watched the faces etched in video within the fountain's twin pillars transform into different faces.

Maloo wears a purple shawl and granny glasses. Her hair, very important in the context of this story, is short, white, cute and swoops backward. She's 52, a native of Canada and warm. She keeps a coon hound curled at her feet and is prone to saying things such as "I didn't rescue this dog, this dog rescued me." Her office at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier does not have a window: It is a small, white-painted cinder-block cell, made all the more claustrophobic by the human hair and eyeless faces that surround her. Indeed, a few shelves above her desk, the frazzled, hippie tresses of Stevie Nicks rested on a Styrofoam head.

About midway into the latest X-Men flick, Bryan Singer’s generous, delightfully convoluted “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” there is a prison break so exuberant and uncharacteristic of superhero movies that you sit up a bit in your seat. You feel the audience around you snapping to. Not because Singer’s return to the 14-year-old film franchise feels undernourished (it doesn’t). Or what comes before seems perfunctory (it’s not). But because the sequence — Wolverine, the Pentagon and “Sanford & Son” — is so eccentric you’re reminded that a little charm has been in the contract between audiences and superheroes all along:

Leslie Buchbinder comes from money. She knows influence. Her family made its reputation in the refrigeration business, and one of the ways her father invested was by collecting art. They are well-connected in the Chicago art world. In particular, the Buchbinders, who became friends with artists, curators and museum administrators, enthusiastically collected the colorful surrealism of the Hairy Who and of the Chicago Imagists, two loose, playful cadres of Chicago painters that sprang up in the 1960s and whose sweaty, grotesque caricatures of bodies and bodily fluids remain a bedrock influence on contemporary artists and cartoonists.

Late on a Friday afternoon in early spring, inside a cavernous soundstage on the Warner Bros. studio lot, Pete Holmes stood in the dark. He had finished the monologue of his talk show and introduced the latest video comedy sketch he made with his writers and producers, then the lights in the studio had dimmed. And he stood there.

The release of a new "Godzilla" movie is never the best occasion to illustrate the importance of subtlety. Couple that with a few facts — this latest "Godzilla" is a Warner Bros. production with a budget far north of $100 million, released at the onset of summer, carrying expectations of more Godzilla to come — and you brace for quite the opposite. Because you know: You live in a binge culture, you always see the good parts in the trailer, you never expect to wait long for the big reveal anymore.

Books become TV series. Amusement park rides become movies. Pop songs become Broadway musicals. But how do you adapt a city into a video game? How do you digitize the essence of a major American metropolis within the framework of a playable experience? Can you hope to capture the geography and character of a real place in a game? Should you aim for accuracy? Or reinvent that place to make it work for you?

In the West Town loft that Jessica Charlesworth shares with husband, Tim Parsons, along the back wall, on a row of metal filing cabinets, a kaleidoscope of Post-it notes waved in a soft draft, each a kind of dispatch from the future. I leaned in to decipher the scribbles: "Plans to build solar farms on the moon," I read aloud.

Walking out of a cramped, stuffy United Center boardroom two weeks ago, Michelle Harris told me that when she was younger and growing up in Chicago, "I dreamed of being a part of corporate America." She said this unequivocally, without a hint of guile, a wink or even a sneer. She loves a good meeting. Almost as much as she loves a good T-shirt cannon.

For one of the final scenes of the first season of the new HBO comedy series "Silicon Valley," creator Mike Judge and his production designers re-created TechCrunch Disrupt, the intense annual San Francisco conference where computer engineers, developers and programmers compete for attention, pitching nascent startups to trawling venture capital investors and media figures.

It's officially spring. We're deep into pothole season, which, like other holiday seasons, seems to grow longer every year. This pothole season could be the longest yet. Potholes are out of control. The Chicago Department of Transportation said last month that pothole complaints have tripled in the past year; and since New Year's Day alone, the city has filled more than 350,000 potholes. And because, according to CDOT, which assumes there are at least five unreported potholes for each reported pothole, their conservative estimate of the number of potholes remaining is, well, about 60,000 potholes.

The new movie "Divergent" opens on a marsh, wild and untended, its grasses long, wavy and serene. So what follows, considering the relatively benign, "Ferris Bueller"-ed archetype of Chicago on film, might prove unnerving: As the camera pans across those grasses, it picks up a rusting cargo ship, stranded and incongruous; then a tall, vast metal fence; and finally, inside that fence, as the camera pushes forward, an ominous, decaying Chicago. You've seen versions of this shot in many movies in the past few decades, the skyline as seen from Lake Michigan, the camera racing over Navy Pier …

Wes Anderson came to Chicago at the beginning of the month to promote his new film, "The Grand Budapest Hotel." He arrived by train, stopping on his way from Los Angeles to New York, where he lives. He even had his own private train car. Now, you might assume his mode of transportation was about drawing attention to a new movie — pure whistle-stop promotion. And yet Chicago was his only stop: Anderson just prefers traveling by rail.

A few months before Michelle Grabner presided over the final details of the prestigious 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art here, a white Buick LeSabre plowed into the side of her small art gallery in Oak Park. This was back in the fall, on a quiet Sunday just after dawn. She knew the car was coming, and she welcomed the impact. She even invited some friends to come over and watch.

Jonah Hill had an unremarkable Oscar Sunday. Perhaps you heard: He won nothing; he did nothing. He woke up early and drove to a Starbucks in the suburbs outside Naperville, where he bought a coffee, then he drove home and shoveled the snow from his driveway for the umpteenth time lately: "Yeah, it pretty much sucked," Jonah Hill told the Chicago Tribune in an exclusive Oscar Sunday interview. "I am so sick of this winter." So sick that Hill climbed into jeans, a long-sleeve T-shirt and never once put on a tuxedo. In fact, Hill said he was not planning to attend the Vanity Fair party, or the Governors Ball, or any Oscar soirees at all.

Just the other day, the day that James Franco visited the Poetry Foundation to speak with acclaimed poet and mentor Frank Bidart on stage before a sold-out crowd of 800, the following poetic events happened: About 5:40 p.m on Wednesday, outside Northwestern University's law school off Lake Shore Drive, a line of students waited. The event was scheduled for 8 p.m., but the weather was mild. Melting snow cast slushy puddles across the sidewalks. In the lobby beside the auditorium set aside for the reading, Matti Bunzl, artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival (which had partnered with the Poetry Foundation for the reading), said, with a wink: "You can't pull this crowd for a historian from University of Michigan, can you?"

Before his poetry reading Wednesday night, James Franco, who has been in town rehearsing for his Broadway debut in "Of Mice and Men" with director (and Steppenwolf ensemble member) Anna Shapiro, spoke to the Tribune about his side job as a poet, his friendship with the Pulitzer-nominated 74-year-old poet Frank Bidart and Franco's new book of poems, "Directing Herbert White," a kind of tribute to his mentor.

You want to know the best thing about the Chicago Pedway? It's not that, despite this Polar Vortex winter, you can cover almost 40 city blocks on the Pedway without ever stepping foot outside. It's not that the Pedway began modestly in 1951 and now stretches through the North Loop, jogs beneath Millennium Park and ventures as far east as the mouth of the Chicago River. It's not that the Pedway could be regarded as a kind of yardstick of municipal progress, always seeming as though it might extend just a little bit longer someday. It's not even that the Pedway's generally mundane, charm-free hallways offer little to see — look, another "For Rent" sign! — and therefore it works perfectly as a daily treadmill for ambulatory meditation.

Late Monday afternoon, the lobby of the Gene Siskel Film Center was thick with expectations. The money guys hovered. They were about to see the result of their investments — they were about to see "Life Itself," the new Steve James documentary about movie critic Roger Ebert. And, frankly, the money guys expected a return, a little something something. Still, they were polite about it: Jonathan Boehle, 23, unemployed, from Cornell, 100 miles southwest of Chicago, said matter-of-factly: "I heard the film needed money. I knew I should donate."

Travon Biggs, a.k.a. the Bop King of the World, a.k.a. the Fastest Legs on the West Side, a.k.a. the originator of the Kemo Step, a.k.a. Lil' Kemo, walked up his unplowed street in North Lawndale the other day, sneakers sliding sideways in the slush. Behind him a rabbit hopped out on the sidewalk, reconsidered it and hopped back beneath a fence. Across the street, an elderly man shoveling a walkway shouted: "Proud of you, Kemo!" Biggs, whom everyone calls Kemo (and I will call Kemo from here), waved over his shoulder.

A few years ago in the New Yorker, Tina Fey, in an essay about her time as a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” broke down the show's writing staff into two fundamental groups: “Harvard Boys and Improv People.” The latter (which includes Fey, John Belushi and Bill Murray) are visceral, loose, often rooted in Second City theatrical training. The Harvard Boys (of whom she includes Conan O'Brien and Al Franken) tend to be “hyperintelligent” and headier: “If you're sitting at the Harvard Lampoon Castle with your friends, you can perfect a piece of writing so that it is exactly what you want and you can avoid the feeling of red-hot flop sweat.”

Among the many things to admire about the new HBO crime series "True Detective" is the title, which is broad, pithy, self-conscious and laced with a stank of menace. Or maybe that's just the smell it gives off when played against the show's apocalyptic expanses: wide-open swaths of rural Louisiana that nevertheless seem thick with shadows, churning refineries and old churches crumbling picturesquely in the high grasses.

A couple of weeks ago at Lincoln Hall, late on a Saturday afternoon, Chester Novell Turner took the stage. Or rather, to be exact, he climbed onto the stage, throwing a leg sideways and hoisting himself from the floor to the stage. He did not seem to notice the short flight of stairs waiting a few feet away. The scene was awkward, unintentionally funny, yet charmingly befitting: Turner is the director of “Tales From the Quadead Zone” and “Black Devil Doll From Hell,” microscopically budgeted, Chicago-made horror movies from the 1980s, both of which are beyond awkward — awkwardly paced, awkwardly acted. Both were shot on VHS tape, so the picture quality is awkward. And both led to a film career that's as awkward as it is remarkable.

Chris Kaskie pulled out his phone and flipped though his pictures until he stopped on an image, then turned the screen toward me and grinned: It showed the local staff of Pitchfork Media, the Chicago company behind the Pitchfork music website and Pitchfork Music Festival, absorbed in what appeared to be — gasp — print media.

Jhumpa Lahiri, who at 46 has already won a Pulitzer Prize (for her first book, the 1999 story collection "Interpreter of Maladies"), and was recently shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (for her new novel, "The Lowland"), does a number of things obviously well: Not one for literary gymnastics, she is a precisionist, a realist, not an ironist. She does not bend genre, slum among dystopias or gauge the state of the nation. A stern admirer of Thomas Hardy, Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant — all of whom remained thematically, stylistically, put — she writes about middle-class South Asian families, assimilation and estrangement.

Samantha Irby, who may well be the most talented inappropriate woman in Chicago, sat against the window, facing the bar, an arm draped across a wooden booth, supremely confident. She delivered great line after great line, quip after quip. She referred somewhat jokingly to the Chicago publishers of her new book as "dirtbag hipsters in the finest sense," described her sex life so vividly that I found myself curling inward, explained so bluntly why white women make up a big percentage of her devoted readers that I wanted to evaporate. Basically, as I picked at sweet potato fries and listened, she was killing, and I was her audience.

"Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe" demands a soft toilet seat and, I estimate, 17.4 hours of your time. That's a compliment. In fact, if you don't own a bathroom, build one immediately so you may luxuriate for obnoxiously long, undisturbed stretches with artist Tim Leong's self-described "love letter to the medium," an absorbing, wonderfully unnecessary pairing of inventive, beautiful designs with nerd-friendly comic-book statistics and insights.

“Diehards,” Erin Feinberg’s touching new book of photographs of music fans, many of whom are captured in moments beyond words, offers little context. Mostly there are no names, places or dates — nothing but a T-shirt, tattoo, some face paint or a prosthetic limb (with a custom Dylan mural) to cue us in on who these diehards are diehard about. And that, flipping through the first time, was my literal-minded, music-geek reaction: I wanted to know who these people were, what they were listening to.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google.com is the most visited online front door in the United States. According to Alexa, a longtime Internet statistics firm, it is also the second most visited home page in the world behind Facebook.com; roughly 40 percent of global Internet users visit Google's primary portal at least once a day. And yet, considering the culture-changing ubiquity of the Silicon Valley-based tech giant — which reported more than $50 billion in revenue last year — what a user tends to find there is famously, comically austere. It is a digital Antarctica: Sheer white for miles, no ads, no headlines, just a search bar and the Google logo.

“Fast & Furious 6,” — which surely maxed out Universal’s tank-top budget for the year, and sustains its joyful, unpretentious ridiculousness so perfectly that I secretly hoped the “6” meant “hours long,” — ends with a disclaimer, the sort of small-type legalese that typically arrives at the tail end of the closing credits. Except here it’s at the immediate end of the story, like a Viagra warning/promise of a potential nine-hour, uh, adrenaline rush.

Sometime in the next few weeks, if you're walking down Fullerton Avenue around DePaul University and have 15 minutes to spare, duck into the tidy brick building alongside the CTA station. Here you will find the DePaul Art Museum, an institution so humble that only "Art Museum" is spelled across its modest facade. The admission is free, though the lessons offered in its first gallery, at least through June 16, feel priceless.

Zach Braff (Northwestern University, class of '97), the third most popular Zach in Hollywood (after Galifianakis and Efron), went back to his old school last week. He'd returned to teach an acting class, a one-time workshop. The day before, he tweeted: “Illinois, I am in you.” Then later, more nostalgically: “Northwestern University, I'm back. Are we good at sports now?” I had assumed Braff was not a big deal anymore — that, though “Scrubs” reruns remain a fact of life and memories of “Garden State” linger, his voice acting (“Oz The Great and Powerful”) and Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a “Garden State” follow-up spoke volumes.

C2E2 -- the annual, gargantuan Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo at McCormick Place -- opened Friday, and as usual for the first day of a major comic book convention, things started slow, geeks were still arriving, B-list celebrities just settling in, Green Lanterns getting off work.

"David Bowie Is," the exhibition catalog for the "David Bowie Is" retrospective that opened recently at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (currently breaking museum-attendance records, and running through August), is vast. "David Bowie Is," the coffee-table book, is also a pleasant orange. That's the first thing you notice: The front is orange, the back is orange, many interior graphics are orange; on the front, faded into a sunset hue, Bowie as youthful and spiky, that iconic lighting-bolt makeup slashing his face, and on the back, Bowie in his 40s, haggard and stricken. But composed. Always composed. There is not a picture in this doorstop — toothy Bowie at 6, sitting for what appears to be a school photo; cool Bowie at 20, cigarette at his side, staring questionably at the camera on a London rooftop; disguised Bowie several decades later, in a silver wig and disorientingly exact as Andy Warhol, on the set of the movie “Basquiat” — that appears candid or not self-consciously aware that someday, someone will wonder about this image, its meaning and how to replicate it.

Around this time last year during C2E2 — the busy, sprawling Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo held each spring at McCormick Place — we spoke with the heads of DC Comics and Marvel Entertainment. We told them that, because we're curious, we would soon be bringing up an age-old question, a schoolyard tussle without a satisfactory answer.

Once a month, at Third Coast Comics in the Edgewater neighborhood, the store closes for the evening and the knitting comes out. Followed by the drinks. Drink & Draw & Knitting Night is the second Thursday of each month, as it has been since Terry Gant opened Third Coast nearly five years ago. When I asked who actually comes to this, he replied: “Nerds, artists, fiber-arts folks, nerds — by and large, super-nerdy people show up for knitting nights at comic book shops.”

CHAMPAIGN — Film festivals — festivals themselves, let alone films — are rarely as poignant as the one unfolding right now in this college town. The 15th Annual Roger Ebert’s Film Festival began Wednesday without its founder, who died two weeks ago. Earlier in the evening, an hour or so before the opening-night gala, Chaz Ebert, his widow, told a reception at the University of Illinois’ president’s home that every year after Ebertfest, on their way back to Chicago, the couple would write down movies to show next time. Before he died, Roger left her a long list, of dozens of movies to show.

William Friedkin, the director of “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist,” a pair of acclaimed Tracy Letts adaptations (“Bug” and “Killer Joe”) and author of “The Friedkin Connection,” a new memoir about his 50-plus-year filmmaking career, answered the door of his hotel room. It was a lousy room. “Small,” he said simply. He stepped aside to let me in, looking disappointed and resigned. He wore large, 1970s-style eyeglasses, sneakers, black socks and a black shirt. He tugged his chinos high above his waist. This is not much bigger than the one-room apartment that he grew up in at the corner of Foster Avenue and Sheridan Road, he said.

On page 12 of issue No. 1 of DC Comics' latest reiteration of "Constantine," which tells the ongoing story of John Constantine — a.k.a. Hellblazer, the publisher's three-decade-old, morally slippery sorcerer/sleuth to the occult world (played by Keanu Reeves in the 2005 "Constantine" movie) — an airline stewardess explodes. Sure, she slips poison into Constantine's drink just before exploding; and sure, she kind of chants something to herself in the plane's lavatory, resulting in self-immolation. But in one panel she explodes; and in the next, Constantine, stone faced, is straightening his tie in the lavatory mirror, apparently unimpressed.

Andrew Barber deals almost exclusively with young men who have come into money. Some are newly rich; some started poor and worked their way to comfortable; and others, arguably his bread and butter, are not wealthy yet but stand to make a chunk of change. Some, he finds, and some come to him.

You know what "Star Wars" is about? I mean, really about? Vietnam. It's a critical allegory of the war: The Rebels are the scrappy Viet Cong, hastily assembled, devoted and relentless; the Empire is the American military, tripped up by an enemy using guerrilla tactics and inferior weaponry. Oh, there's more here, but...

You know the Calumet Baking Powder cans in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining"? You know — the Calumet Baking cans? Lining the pantry of the film's Overlook Hotel? No, no: The baking cans behind all the carnage! Right, those baking cans. What's that, you didn't notice those cans, red and white, with the familiar Indian-headdress logo, what with all the rivers of blood and the axe-wielding and the bug-eyed Shelley Duvalls?

You're alone in the far back corner of a basement on Roosevelt Road, the air choked with the dank smell of age. Above you, a Berwyn storefront. Around you, the cluttered office of its owner. What kind of maniac intentionally keeps his desk in the far back corner of a musty basement, removed from any possibility of sunlight, the otherworldly scream of a heating duct the only sound to keep him company?

Four Hundred Fifty-One Degrees is not a boy band. The group was founded by a boy, and it is led by a boy, but its ranks are primarily girls. It came together just 18 months ago and, depending on the week, it claims 15 to 20 members. That fluctuation should not be misread as a lack of commitment: The members have matching T-shirts, with “451 Degrees” emblazoned across the fronts. That said, matching T-shirts should not be misread as popularity: Until the other day, 451 Degrees was not especially well-known.

NEW YORK — Sorry, but I've heard that Brooklyn is over. You can get your hipster mustache waxed; just don't do it in Brooklyn. You wouldn't go to Seattle now, would you? If you wanted to visit the American community of the moment, you would visit, say, Portland, Ore. Haven't you heard: Brooklyn's compromised, edge-free; it's Portland five minutes ago.

Aleksandar Hemon landed in the United States two decades ago, January 1992. He was 27, a young Bosnian journalist from Sarajevo arriving on a one-month visa, arranged through a cultural exchange program sponsored by the State Department. Just after he arrived, war broke out in Yugoslavia. Hemon was stranded. In the years since, as he settled into this country and became an acclaimed writer — became one of Chicago's finest contemporary writers and arguably its most important literary talent since Saul Bellow — Hemon has told this immigration story many, many times.

Neil Shubin has the wide, happy eyes of a Muppet and the casual, ingratiating prattle of a car salesman. His thick, graying hair lends gravitas. He has written a new book, and on a bitter afternoon in Hyde Park he is explaining to me how he writes.

Anne Hathaway — insufferable, grating, insistently chipper, with those big stupid puppy-dog eyes and that dumb pixie hair, shocked, shocked, at the fortune and appreciation bestowed on her talented head, so rehearsed in her faux-humility, so rehearsed in her faux-uncertainty (“Thank you very much for this lovely blunt object that I will forevermore use as a weapon against self-doubt,” she barfed at the Golden Globes, after receiving an award she was assured of winning) — is wonderful.

As it says here, on page 64 of the glossily fascinating coffee-table book "Variety: An Illustrated History of the World From the Most Important Magazine in Hollywood," Al Capone, interviewed in his Chicago home, told Variety he was approached often to appear in gangster films but "snorted at most." He hated gangster films but liked movies and often had "private showings with professional projectionists to run the show." He was also famously self-aggrandizing, and on a wall of his home — a home protected by 70 bodyguards — it was noted his portrait hung beside portraits of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

Before I explain what it was like to be a childless man surrounded by Disney princesses and the parents who love (and bankroll) them, seated by himself at Disney on Ice and soaking in princess culture — a story:

Last month after a screening, even as the lights came up in the theater, I could feel "Zero Dark Thirty" fading, its images and impact already softening in my head. No, no, wait: not fading — mingling. If our cultural experiences rub shoulders at a kind of cocktail party in our brains, then "Zero Dark Thirty," as soon as we were done chatting, as much I admired its company, slipped away quietly into the cultural crush.

A year ago this time, Gillian Flynn was just another former Entertainment Weekly TV critic turned Chicago author of murder-mysteries who lived in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood and had already sold film rights to her first two novels ("Dark Places" and "Sharp Objects"). You know? C'mon, do something with yourself, sister! Then June arrived, and so did Flynn's blockbuster novel "Gone Girl."

Years ago when I was a student at Northwestern University, a handful of executives at America Online came to my class and explained that you, I and everyone we know would soon find ourselves pleasantly stranded on "information islands." We nodded, though we didn't entirely understand. What they meant was that broadcasting would soon end and nichecasting would take over. Your island would become a mirror of yourself, what you knew, liked and watched, and you would rarely have the incentive to venture off of your narrowly prescribed landmass.

The young guy in the trucker cap, skinny jeans and Air Jordans squeezed the trigger on the toy shotgun and his umpteenth round of “Big Buck Hunter” blasted to life. The guy was maybe 25 and so focused on bagging digital deer, the butt of the gun pressed hard into his shoulder, that he never noticed the tall, smiling man behind him, watching.

Last spring, during Easter dinner, my aunt leaned across the table and asked: "Chris, have you read this 'Fifty Shades of Grey?'" I said I had not but I had heard about it and, changing the subject, had she read —

Rock star money buys stuff. Homes, planes, influence. For Kirk Hammett, the longtime guitarist of Metallica, rock star money also bought the horror-movie childhood he never quite had. Around the mid-1980s, as the band started to make a name for itself, Hammett, who grew up in San Francisco obsessed with monster movies and comic books, began collecting the monster movie paraphernalia that he once pined for but could never afford as a child. Newly flush, he began contacting dealers and developing relationships with collectors around the world. And soon he owned many of the same toys and models and masks that he had once ogled in the back pages of the legendary horror fanzine “Famous Monsters of Filmland.” Then he went further: He bought original movie costumes, props, Halloween masks, ultra-rare posters, even the original art that had graced the covers of “Famous Monsters.”

The Wall of Bad Art at the Hotel Lincoln, the newly renovated boutique hotel in Lincoln Park at the corner of Wealthy and Twee, is a monument to iffy talent and questionable taste. It is a reminder of how bad art can get funneled through wood-paneled rec rooms and yard sales and come out the other end as good taste, warm memories and enduring charm.

My first dog was a golden retriever named Tisha. Tisha was quiet and friendly, a perfect golden for a 4-year-old boy; my mother swears that when we took her to the vet one last time, as the dog lay dying on the operating table, Tisha lifted her head at the sound of my voice, though I doubt this actually happened. My next dog, the dog that I remember best, was an Irish setter named Hombre. I would wrap him in a blanket and drag him around the house and he loved it.

Until recently I owned just two books that were composed of little else but pictures of people's bookshelves. Not nearly enough. One book I received last year for Christmas, a compendium of pictures of author's bookshelves, a sort of literary rubbernecking. The other book I received many Christmases ago, a coffee-table book of pictures of people reclining at home surrounded by their mammoth collections of books. The latter contains a picture I have never forgotten: Keith Richards in a chair in the center of a large home library, probably in a mansion in the British countryside, strumming a guitar and surrounded (you realize the closer you stare into the picture) by shelf after shelf of war histories, biographies of generals and tactical manuals.

I climb out of the car, step into damp October leaves and stare up at the Logan Square apartment building across the street. A chill rushes up the street. I notice a man standing in the front yard, shuffling back and forth. He does not appear rabid. He appears to be in his mid-30s, with black-frame glasses, maybe a graduate student. He is behind a black fence, and as I take a tentative step in his direction, I realize: He is Scott Kenemore, zombie writer, the most prolific zombie writer in a subgenre I had assumed was dead.

The Wachowskis lie low. It's what they do. Indeed, They do it so well that when you meet the Wachowskis and ask them about their lying low, you find yourself reminding yourself: You have never really seen them before. Not really. They don't stand for pictures often. Their withdrawal, their lack of participating with press, Andy Wachowski says to me, reporters have always seemed to take this personally. He's a thick and barrel-chested guy with the shaved scalp and narrow, skeptical eyes of a film-noir heavy.

Chicago's Oldest Living Hipster lives in Edgewater, on the North Side. He is 92 but looks 83. He lives behind a wrought-iron fence, surrounded on all sides by the drabbest of stone-colored apartment complexes.

In the last shot of Ben Affleck's "Argo" — relax, there are no spoilers here — the camera pans slowly along the shelves of toys in a young boy's bedroom. The year is 1980; the film spends most of its time on the true story of how a CIA operative named Tony Mendez (Affleck) used the faux production of a low-budget sci-fi picture as the cover to sneak a handful of American embassy workers out of an Iran in the midst of post-revolutionary upheaval.

What do you expect from a rock star? I just closed the back cover of Neil Young's “Waging Heavy Peace,” his big anticipated memoir (of sorts), clocking in at 500 pages (75 shy of the rock star-memoir mountain peak established by Keith Richards' “Life”); then I walked around the block; listened to his album “After the Goldrush” on my iPod from beginning to end; checked on the Blu-Ray price of “The Neil Young Archives Vol. 1” on Amazon (still $350); thought about whether I could make an Orange Julius at home; double-checked the date of Neil Young and Crazy Horse's show at the United Center (Oct. 11); admired the library book-spine design of “Waging Heavy Peace”; flipped to a random page and read a random line (“I am fascinated by the power of nature”); stood up, went out, got coffee, returned, sat in front of the book I just finished and tried to remember if I read that correctly — Young once lived in a cabin with a band featuring Rick James on vocal and the cabin was attacked by polar bears?

If you were building a Chris Ware, if you were constructing the most celebrated cartoonist of the past couple of decades, drawing up the plans for an Oak Park illustrator so routinely referred to as a genius that the accolade is more like fact than opinion, the first thing you would need is doubt. Preferably, self-doubt. But uncertainty, self-flagellation, humility-verging-on-delusion — any of these would work.

“Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things” only slightly exaggerates. It is 100 stories about 100 things, though only a handful of the stories are extraordinary. In fact, fewer are memorable.

Just when the chef memoir had started tasting a little overly familiar — the long struggles to cook their food their way, the breakthrough review, the stove burns, the final 60 pages where nothing much happens but happiness and prosperity — along comes a chef memoir with a story that's worth 300 pages.

People wave things over their heads at concerts. Especially during weekend music festivals. Lollapalooza, for instance. Cigarette lighters, cell phones, hands, of course. That forked, heavy metal hand salute, for sure. And the rain on Saturday brought out umbrellas, as you’d guess (though fewer than you’d expect).

The first salvo of the Great Burger-Beer-Bourbon Skirmish of 2012 was fired June 8. The last salvo was also fired June 8. There were no casualties or damage, and to be honest, it was a one-sided skirmish.

There's this thing they do at Pixar called plussing. Jonah Lehrer, in his book “Imagine,” describes Pixar plussing as "a technique that allows people to improve ideas without using harsh or judgmental language." During production meetings, instead of merely shooting down ideas, every criticism must come with a plus, with a better idea attached.

As obvious as this may sound at first, the 28th annual Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit Fest, which concluded Sunday afternoon and drew an estimated 130,000 attendees and 200 authors to the South Loop on a sweltering, cloudless weekend, was not the kind of thing you could call up on a Kindle.

Strange as it sounds, reading a book while sitting on public transportation may be what I like best about living in a big city. I would even go as far as to say reading on a train or bus is what urban dwelling is about, a near perfect illustration of how living in a city often means being simultaneously public and anonymous, surrounded by strangers at exactly the moment you just want to be left alone.